Haven't done a year's-best-reading list since the first year I kept a blog. Every year could have this: an expression of gratitude for the astonishing and wonderful books that Life continually sends me. Most of which I'm not looking for. Many of which I judge by their cover, and/or some nudge of intuition, and which turn out to be exactly what I need at that moment.
Isabel Allende was one of those, 15 years ago. She was responsible, as well, for a shift in the way I read, when I made her acquaintance (also by pulling a paperback off the shelf at random). Clara the clairvoyant, central character in _The House of the Spirits_, has a custom of keeping journals. But these aren't just any old diaries filled with personal reminisces: she calls them "my books that give witness to life", and they are literally a record, a remembering, of every single event that happens on her sprawling, multigenerational, highly dysfunctional family homestead. While that was a bit much for me, I was attracted to "witness to life". To both writing and reading as ways to engage more consciously, and positively, with its currents. I began trying to balance, in journals, thought-feelings and reactions with observations, affirmations and connections-of-dots. And I started writing down memorable quotes from every book that I read. I even developed a system of symbols that recognizes the different windows onto understanding opened by these quotes. And, while I often wonder if this habit helps or limits memory, the fact is that I read and forget at almost equally rapid rates. So, if once in a while there's time to look back and wonder whether or not I learned anything in the last year, I have these transcribed lines for my witnesses.
[Note to the angry leftists in my head: Yes, as you've observed, this post will in fact occupy some time, and indulge in a fair amount of introspection. And yes, I might not normally sanction that. It's even going to reveal that I feed my mind as much with fiction as with nonfiction! But right now, it's covered: January's a month of healing. I won't be joining any of you in saving the world this month. I will rest, read, ponder, and seek out any precious lessons learned. From scholarly text, and from powerful story. For as much of Now as it takes, to feel safe and sane and sound again.]
Below, then, are my best reads of 2012. (It'd be really fun to see the lists other friends would compile!) And a quote or two from each book, to show the particular beauty that it graced me with.
10. Neil Gaiman - American Gods
All the ancient deities of the world's mythologies, having accompanied immigrants to this country over the centuries, realize that their power is fading because not enough people support them with the old practices and with belief. They convene for a showdown with the "new gods" of media, celebrity, technology, and drugs, their replacements. A lonely ex-convict named Shadow is caught up in the intrigue and discovers he has a greater role than he knew, while meeting characters on a cross-country roadtrip with names like Mr. Wednesday and Low-Key Lyesmith. Mr. Gaiman's unique mix of depth and irreverence is barely even quotable. You just had to be there.
9. David Holmgren - Permaculture
A book on systems thinking doesn't really fit into sound-bites. But here are a couple of best efforts.
"the connections between things are as important as the things themselves"
"With little experience of whole-system thinking, and such cultural impediments, we need to focus our efforts on simple and accessible whole systems before we try to amend large and complex ones. The self is the most accessible and potentially comprehensible whole system."
"While global capitalism has been like a fire converting green forests to ashes, it has likewise released potential and information from the constraints of cultural norms and institutions that were hopelessly inappropriate for dealing with a world of declining energy."
8. Octavio Paz - The Labyrinth of Solitude
This master elocutionist takes on the psychology of Mexico and the meaning of human separateness and connection.
"In the Valley of Mexico man feels himself suspended between heaven and earth, and he oscillates between contrary powers and forces, and petrified eyes, and devouring mouths. Reality -- that is, the world that surrounds us -- exists by itself here, has a life of its own, and was not invented by man as it was in the United States."
"How can we tell that man is possibility, frustrated by injustice?"
7. Camilla Gibb - Sweetness in the Belly
A sensory and heartfelt narrative of a young British woman and her memories of growing up in the city of Harar, Ethiopia, just prior to Emperor Selassie’s deposition. Honoring and questioning cultural, political and religious issues while centering on a couple of very human journeys and themes of exile and belonging. One review called it " A poem to belief and to the displaced".
"It is not simply what one remembers, but why. There are sites of amputation where the past is severed from the body of the present. Remembering only encourages the growth of phantom limbs."
"there's an organ without a name that only registers the invisible."
"He whispers, 'Hindus believe that the essence of the person -- the soul -- lives on, reincarnated over and over with greater maturity each time to the point where it ultimately achieves enlightenment, freedom from the body. It is what we all ultimately wish for.' Like a Sufi, I think, only a Sufi attempts to do it in a single lifetime."
6. Seyyed Hossein Nasr - The Garden of Truth: The Vision and Promise of Sufism, Islam's Mystical Tradition
An engagingly welcome combination of mind and heart: philosophy, ideology, love for beauty.
"The spiritual life may in fact be defined as the practice of techniques that enable us to forget all that we remember about the world of separation and dispersion and to remember..."
"love runs through the arteries of the universe"
"If understood spiritually, beauty becomes itself the means of recollection and the rediscovery of our true nature."
5. Amitav Ghosh - The Glass Palace, The Hungry Tide, River of Poppies, Sea of Smoke
Mr. Ghosh is my favorite new discovery, whose work I am devouring as quickly as possible. I didn't copy quotes from these because they're the kind, and the quality, of book that you just fall into and read almost without stopping. Rip-roaring adventures with a healthy dose of history, world politics, and human migrations mixed in. Pure food for the imagination and the mind. http://www.amitavghosh.com/
4. Arnold Mindell - Dreambody
Mr. Mindell draws from Jung, shamanistic studies and Australian aboriginal ways to attempt a synthesis of mind-body-psyche understanding and healing...potent medicine.
"the real body...a potential temple which is unaware of the gods it is carrying."
"Remember, if you want to learn how to heal the body you must start at home, in your own forest, in your own body. There, lying within your own symptoms is the spirit that makes you ill. But this very same spirit has the healing potion..."
(citing the Upanishads) "Yama's first message tells the young man that enlightenment -- that is, connection to the spirit -- cannot be had through wishing. It occurs only through contact with death, with body symptoms."
3. Kelley Eskridge - Solitaire/Connie Willis - Passage
These two sci-fi novels share a spot because they arrived in the same month and with the same intense relevance to present questions: how far can a person travel toward healing, within the boundaries of her own mind? And how fluid can our concepts of life and identity become while preserving our wholeness? Connie Willis writes of a pair of neurologists researching near-death experiences whose work takes some definite turns for the unexpected. Fascinating insights about our relationship to death and to facing our fears. From her book I again have no quotes; only gratitude for this: the experience of hearing the moment right after a sound had stopped.
Ms. Eskridge tells of a not-too-distant future Earth ruled by technology and dominated by the planet's first corporate-nation-state in Hong Kong, called Ko. A woman employed with Ko is framed for a terrible crime and given a choice of sentence: many years in regular prison, or 8 months in a suspended-animation virtual solitary confinement. When she chooses the latter, she embarks on a gut-wrenching inner journey through the nature of mind, reality, and self that breaks all the expectations of the technology, the system, and her own as well, and finally leads to her liberation on all levels.
"I think there's a threshold of alone that most of us can't pass beyond without some kind of profound change."
"It was inconceivable that there could be a hole in a virtual cell, where there had been none before. She sat for much too long thinking about how none of it could be true before she realized that her opinion didn't seem to matter much to the hole...Then she took a deep breath, and began to kick down the wall."
2. Belleruth Naparstek - Invisible Heroes: Survivors of Trauma and How They Heal
Another book pulled off the library shelves that met exactly the need of the moment. The author worked as a therapist with the entire imaginable range of trauma and PTSD sufferers, from Vietnam vets to 9/11 survivors to adults subjected to abuse or cult practices as children. Her explanation of how trauma affects mind, body and spirit is clear and holistic, and the inclusiveness of the stories across the spectrum offers a welcome to those seeking a path to healing and to understanding the validity of their experience. Ample appendices and a set of guided meditations complement the information. This book and its quotes will most likely show up in a future post.
1. Richard Power - The Echo Maker
Yet author I'd never heard of is the creator of the most amazing thing I read all year. In a small town in central Nebraska, a young man suffers a head trauma in a highway accident and emerges with Capgras syndrome, the belief that what he perceives is not the authentic world, but that every object and every person in his life has been secretly replaced with a duplicate. His older sister and a circle of other caregivers converge on the scene, confronting troubled family history and inner demons of their own. Everyone in the central circle of characters deeply re-evaluates her/himself over the story's course. Every character exasperated me at some point, and a few redeemed themselves. Some change dramatically and others face their inability to change. This book was one incredible mind-trip, as well as a lovely homage to the Platte River landscape and its migrating sandhill crane population. But the language of the story is what stole my heart, with its shifting points of view, and particularly the trippy, disjointed attempts to capture the fractured thoughts of the man recovering from brain injury (first two quotes that follow).
"A flock of birds, each one burning. Stars swoop down to bullets. Hot red specks take flesh, nest there, a body part, part body.
Lasts forever: no change to measure."
"So he says nothing. Some things say him."
"Damage had somehow unblocked him, removing the mental categories that interfered with truly seeing. Assumption no longer smoothed out observation. Every glance now produced its own landscape."
Here is a statement from the author about his intent for the book:
"[The] aim in The Echo Maker is to put forward, at the same time, a glimpse of the solid, continuous, stable, perfect story we try to fashion about the world and about ourselves, while at the same time to lift the rug and glimpse the amorphous, improvised, messy, crack-strewn, gaping thing underneath all that narration. To this end, my technique was what some scholars of narrative have called double voicing. Every section of the book (until a few passages at the end) is so closely focalized through Mark, Karin, or Weber that even the narration of material event is voiced entirely through their cognitive process: the world is nothing more than what these sensibilities assemble, without any appeal to outside authority."
Should you see theme or themes in this list...you'd be correct. But I repeat, I didn't go looking along any theme. Life sends what I need. A day at a time and a book at a time.
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